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Belated Review: Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

This is another movie that I heard was so bad that it wasn’t watching, and considering the quality of the past couple of Transformers movies, I could believe it. Thus, instead of actually getting the movie and taking a look, it sat on my Amazon list forever.

But hey, why buy a really awful movie when I can just watch it for free on Amazon Prime, right?

Following the war in Chicago, the Transformers have been outlawed and the CIA is hunting them down with the help of Lockdown, some kind of interstellar bounty hunter who is out looking for Optimus Prime. Meanwhile, corporate douchebag Joshua Joyce is collecting robot parts so that he can make his own Transformers, with the help of the CIA. And failed inventor Cade Yeager and his daughter Tessa go on the run with Optimus Prime because… reasons. If there’s a coherent story in there, I don’t know where it’s hiding.

I don’t even know where to begin on this thing. It’s an all new cast and that cast just sucks. I mean, Mark Wahlberg is occasionally passable in some movies, but here he’s awful. Not as awful as his daughter, Nicola Peltz, who if it’s at all possible that she’s now a worse actress than she was in The Last Airbender, she’s achieved it. Everyone else, even otherwise good actors like Kelsey Grammar, are just dismal. And what’s worse, every one, every single character in this thing is a complete asshole. I want them all dead. Twice. Painfully. Daddy Yeager is a super over-protective prick. They introduced an entirely unnecessary underage sex story that was totally meaningless and they could have just made his daughter 18 and not lost a thing. Her racer boyfriend is a chickenshit jerk. Joshua Joyce is a self-absorbed jackass. I mean who are we supposed to be rooting for here? Can Megatron/Galvatron not win? Oh wait, he’s hardly even in the movie! And the Autobots are a bunch of murderous thugs anyhow. This film has no heroes at all.

But no worries because you couldn’t kill anyone in this film if you tried. Seriously, the number of times the human characters should have died is huge. There is no way, no way at all, that these people survived some of those crashes unless they’re secretly Terminators. Well, you can kill people if the plot calls for it, like when Optimus Prime nonchalantly wanders over and kills off CIA bad-guy Harold, not in combat, but as a cold-blooded murder.

There’s so much to hate here. The awful dialogue. The patently ridiculous product placement. The complete and utter lack of a coherent plot. Even the effects are bad. The dinosaurs in the opening looked better in Jurassic Park, more than 20 years ago! Seriously, what in the hell is going on here? Why did I waste nearly 3 hours of my life watching this garbage?

And thus, I have permanently removed this drek from my Amazon want list. Thanks.